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Except we have different predators now -- nanotech particles,
    "Office printers 'are health risk'"
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6923 915.stm
**AA and "Trusted Computing",
    http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
bureaucracies which use robots with guns,
    "First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq"
    http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/httpwwwnatio nal.html
Fox News, compulsory schooling,
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and so on. Think of modern day humans like early small mammals and big multinational corporations as dinosarus made up of eating such small mammals.

A sabertooth tiger seems much more manageable by comparison, doesn't it? Especially when approached by a village of people.

I don't think life expectancy past age five was all that different (that brings down the "average" even if most people past age five lived into their fifties or sixties). Many of us now just get an extra decade or two of frailness and senility tacked on the end, part of it bedbound in a nursing home.

Nice quote at the end. Personally, we can't go back and still have big populations, and people get used to the new toys. But I am responding so much on this thread because without understanding where people have been, I think it is harder to see what we want to get out of technology to bring us full circle back to the leisure and meaning and relative freedom which many people had many thousands of years ago. Likely, so much of what it used to mean to be human (and part of a village or tribe) has been forgotten and propagandized -- some for the good, but also some for the bad.

if you don't say why the citation is relevant, or explain what it's trying to prove,

My original citation was to John Gatto's work. You'd said that you thought "the other coward" was fabricating a statement "about [factory] labor 'drying up' quickly". My original post was to provide a resource that confirms "the other coward's" statement. Gatto is much more eloquent than I can be at this point in time. The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher is a nice concise introduction to Gatto's work.

This bit about school being created to provide a labor force for early industrialists is crucial to the whole debate. Because, if it's true, then there is no such thing as a "free market" in America, as most of the market's participants have been mind-fucked without their even realizing it. Without their indoctrination in the government's schools, individuals would make substantially different choices in their lives, and the economy would be totally different...

I don't like, have to put any of that in my own words, do I? That would be soooooooooooo much work.

I'd much rather read original sources for your position - as it is, we're all just random idiots on Slashdot. :) Simon's wikipedia article is interesting - there's some truth to what he [apparently] said, but there's also some big-picture influences and trends of which he was ignorant, or didn't incorporate into his philosophy. I wonder what he'd think about today's record gas prices... (It's obvious to me that said prices are a result of a longstanding conspiracy to fleece 'teh masses' [us]. No new refineries in 30 years, no oil wells off the California coast, no drilling around Gull Island & elsewhere on Alaska's North Slope, etc). Or the observed effects of climate change (drought in the South East & South West, and too wet in the middle of the country, for example. This according to tonight's piece on fires on NBC Nightly News. I don't watch it, but someone else had the TV on). I understand that the climate change is being driven by underwater volcanos, but IANAClimateExpert, so I'll be watching for a better theory.

You are correct, in that my position is less than totally coherent. I've been putting this puzzle together for years now, and while I've got a pretty good idea what it looks like, I'm still missing a couple pieces. Even so, my model is working pretty well for me as it is.

This event is no big deal, just teaching the fifth lesson.

According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?

As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
    "To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.

The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
      "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
      http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.

That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation
    http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.

Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
    "The Alternative Education Resource Organization"
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And a related article by the leader of that organization:
    "Sustainable Education "
    http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
He writes: "Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate."

Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu,
    http://www.edubuntu.org/
and so on).

What stupidity! Supposedly that's what the so called "American Revolution" was all about. That was a lie too. No one owes these 'non governmental,' private debt collectors, scumbags, anything till... via fraud... they unknowingly "volunteer" into the Private Corporation For Profit called the UNITED STATES which has power only in Washington D.C. (Not even a State!) and territories assigned unto it. This bloody bunch of fools is so G'dm'd stupid that they've given up their individual Sovereignty for a mess of red pottadge! Yeah, the ten proverbial planks!

The Strawman, Corporation Solo, is born with the birth certificate (A bond against the bankruptcy (Oh, ya didn't know that the 'Government' IS bankrupt since roughly 1933?) Corporations are 'fictions,' color of the law, fictions! Thus when you are hoodwinked, or rather your mother is at the hospital hoodwinked, into selling your birthright (your sovereignty as well as the first ten amendments to 'the Constitution for the UNITED STATES' (another gimmick), for debt enslavedness via 'the Birth Certificate (GO ahead look at yours America. Notice anything weird? Just why does the Dep't of Commerce and Transportation have the original copy? Cause you've been bonded!) (Governmental guarantee of socialist 'benefits')

Your STRAWMAN, interface to the world of Commerce, takes the fall. Most people know nothing of this fraud so... go right along with the presumption that they are 14th Amendment slaves (Thanks to the traitor Abraham Lincoln,) identical with their STRAWMAN representative. You see, fictions can only 'talk' to other fictions!

Well... is that a rant? Do some re-search. Then laugh at the IRS...

"I'd rather be a King in Hell than a slave in heaven!" - Rothbard

http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308

From:
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven
lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They
constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you
can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty,
of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when
I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I
teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you
will: ...

The first lesson I teach is confusion.
The second lesson I teach is your class position.
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference.
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem.
The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide. ...

After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.

It is part of propaganda (and perhaps many religions, of which schooling is a secular one), to hide the alternatives, label them evil, or make them into strawman shadows.

So, some class in a compulsory school program taught you something about C++. A technical skill. Is that all "education" (as distinct from "schooling")is supposed to be about? Skills?

Consider:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life. ... Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know. "

Granted it lead you to appreciate some things like some literature. And you are saying it was worth twelve to thirteen years of your early life to do this? Compared to what alternatives? Home schooling? Unschooling?
http://www.unschooling.com/
Free schooling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
Learning on your own in the library?
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/educatn.html
"Could college attendance be a form of cowardice?"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html

At what cost? Would you not perhaps rather have learned to love literature on your own, but instead have the $200K or so (principal of $10K per year plus compound interest over a dozen years) invested in your compulsory schooling upon reaching age 18 so you could live off the interest or buy a house with it to live rent free?

Consider the alternatives to labeling and dividing people and which have been hidden from your view. And then think about how people you trusted did this to you. They took money on your behalf. And left you with a lifetime of industrialized work ahead of you. Consider:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to hig

Consider what Gatto writes here:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The first lesson I teach is confusion."
"The second lesson I teach is your class position."
"The third lesson I teach kids is indifference."
"The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency."
"The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency."
"The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem."
"The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide."
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life."

It may be a long journey before you are willing to admit you have been bamboozled by the very people who proclaimed to be your salvation. It was for me. :-)

As I said in the title, the Gifted label is used to control. If you are a standard product of school, even of a "gifted program", you have been controlled -- neutralized -- domesticated. You have been shaped to fit into a 19th century Brave New World industrial model of how society should be. OK, so you were tracked as an Alpha, so what? You were still controlled -- and limited -- against your wishes. Those very wishes were shaped to fit the perceived needs of that industrial order.

It does not matter if many or most teachers are caring individuals -- they remain the agents and prison wardens of this system; their range of behavior is limited by the system they are embedded in. That is one reason so many of the most caring ones burn out early.

I have no doubt that people vary in interests, experiences, or potential. Consider Howard Gardener's work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences: __
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
"In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories or that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)"

There may well be people who excel at everything. You may be one of them. But so what? How does that justify "compulsory schooling" of anyone? Except to control them. To neutralize any potential benefit of that intelligence on social structure. Even if kids need to be in day prisons because their parents are forced to work to survive (even in this age of abundance):
http://www.whywork.org/
why not "Free schools"?
http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml

On conspiracy, if you read the rest of that online book, you will see that Gatto does not believe in "conspiracy" in a large sense. As he says here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

You may still unconsciously believe the school party line that school teaches people how to think or be creative, whereas as Gatto indicates its main role lies in training people how not to think or be creative.
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Gatto's whole point is that schools were designed for a 19th century vision of industrial utopia -- sort of like a "Brave New World" on 1900s SteamPunk perhaps. But that is not the age we live in after the very success of industrialization and the rise of the internet. Also, you are throwing the word "efficient" around without asking "efficient to what end" -- a sure sign of excess schooling perhaps? :-) Are humans obsolete? Obsolete for whom? Certainly never to themselves. Perhaps you mean obsolete relative to a capitalist economy. If so, should we not be busy rethinking what sort of economy can sustain human life, instead of driving with capitalism off a cliff? Consider for example this essay by E.F. Schumacher:
    http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economic s/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

That's the entire problem right there. People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job [educate their children] for them, ...

Ah yes, the classic bait-and-switch technique. Government: "we're going to educate the children now, so every child gets a chance at developing to their full potential." Meanwhile, they're building an alternate set of "education railroad tracks" that lead to a land where illiteracy is the norm and 'the masses' (We the People) are easy to trick and control. Government goons take over the train's engine and throw the switch, all while proclaiming that all their schools need are a few superficial fixes to make them work right.

Maybe if I hadn't wasted all that time in the government's schools my analogy would be more coherent. John Gatto is very articulate in his trashing of the government school concept. Be sure to read (if you can, that is) /The Underground History of American Education/, and The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher.

Gatto suggests there is a lot more uniformity of soul-breaking methods (see his six or seven lesson schoolteacher essay, linked by a previous poster) http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt and he suggest that in the face of such conformity of methods any diversity of content is mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, those who have most bought into the system are busy shaping it for the next generation. What matters to many in control is to see their kid be broken the same way they were broken, so the kid will do well enough in school to move into a conformist slot in society. However, they do not see this as "breaking" a kid -- they see this as "making" them. There is a tension here between forcing a child to become part of a hierarchical and corrupt and bullying rank-oriented "society" versus helping them find their niche in a free expressive artistic "culture". One path seeks to make children all the same -- a standardized commodity; the other to amplify their differences to help them be the best they can be. Consider novel after novel where the aristocratic executive is trying to break their child to take on the family business which the child abhors. Granted, the schooling system tracks a few percent to be elite managers, but even they are often just as trapped in the system and the mythology that drives it as everyone else (the myth of scarcity and need for conformity to keep the industrial machinery running smoothly). This site: http://www.whywork.org/ is about the future -- and it is not the one compulsory schooling prepares people for.

Great story. Thanks for sharing it.

The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.

I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.

Holt wrote a couple books - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.

I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.

Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."

See John Taylor Gatto's writings for the larger story of how compulsaory schooling was created 150 years ago to turn independent minded US citizens into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
These are the real lessons any school teacher really teaches:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
From there:
"The first lesson I teach is confusion.
The second lesson I teach is your class position.
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference.
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem.
The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide. ...
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life."

Here is an interesting animation of Poincare Dodecahedral Space, also known as S3#.